Shoppers at the Plymouth Meeting Mall in Pennsylvania were the latest victims of "prankvertising" by Lenovo, which is promoting its Yoga 3 laptop.
In the latest Lenovo prank, the company pits the flexible Yoga 3 with its biggest competition, Apple's MacBook, in a form of advertising that might be more impactful to Millennial customers.
"We're here at the mall, and we're going to mess with some people," said a trio of members from the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe at the start of the video for the prank.
The prank has the three members of the UCB pretending to be Lenovo employees, as they tout the hinged Yoga 3 hybrid laptop to shoppers that were passing by a kiosk.
"What makes this laptop special, among many things, is that it bends," say the fake Lenovo employees to shoppers, as the laptop computer is transformed into a tablet.
"Yoga, you get it. Try and do that with a Mac," the employees then say as they pick up what looks like a MacBook Air. The employees try to bend the MacBook the same way that they did with the Yoga 3, but goes on and breaks the Apple laptop.
The shoppers are shocked with what the employees do to the MacBook, but then the prank goes up a notch when the fake employee gives half of the broken MacBook to the shopper then runs off.
Shortly after, a fake mall security official will go to the shopper and ask if the shopper was responsible for breaking the MacBook.
The shoppers deny that they broke the MacBook, and are then even more frustrated when the official reveals that there are no security cameras in the mall that could have recorded the incident to prove that it was an employee that destroyed the laptop.
The prank is then revealed to the shoppers, who all just laugh it off.
Comments in YouTube on the video, however, are focusing less on the prank and more on the comparison between Lenovo and Apple.
"We definitely recognize people will [view] this in different ways, just as we recognize there are passionate supporters of other people's products," said Lenovo digital marketing manager Bob Cordell to Marketing Daily.
"But we hope to do this in a way that we're upfront about it. We're not trying to pull a fast one," Cordell added.
The broken MacBook prank is not the first time that Lenovo pitted a Yoga laptop against the MacBook, with an epic dance-off between the Yoga 3 Pro and the MacBook Air posted a few weeks ago.
